Crypto for Advisors: It’s time for tokenization to get to work

Crypto for Advisors: It’s time for tokenization to get to work

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Crypto for Advisors: It’s time for tokenization to get to work

By

Jason Barraza

,

Joshua de Vos

|

Edited by

Sarah Morton

Jul 23, 2026, 2:53 p.m.

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You’re reading Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter that unpacks digital assets for financial advisors. Subscribe here to get it every Thursday.

Happy Thursday, advisors!

In today’s newsletter,

Jason Barraza

explores why the conversation at TokenizeThis 2026 shifted from "if" to "how" as asset managers prioritize real-world utility over hype. He also highlights the remaining infrastructure gaps that must be solved to unlock the next phase of institutional adoption.

Then, in “Ask an Expert,”

Joshua de Vos

from CoinDesk Research answers questions about tokenized investment products and current market trends.

Happy reading.

Tokenization grew up in 2026, now it has to get to work

Key takeaways from TokenizeThis 2026, where the debate shifted from whether real-world assets belong on-chain to whether anyone is actually using them.

Bitcoin sat around $60,000 for most of the TokenizeThis 2026 conference, and almost nobody on stage seemed to care. The crypto and tokenization narratives have diverged. Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs)

have pushed past $30 billion

, roughly six times where they sat at the start of 2025. During their

keynote

, RedStone’s founders cited an

EY and Coinbase Institutional survey

which found 64% of asset managers now want to tokenize, up from 40% a year earlier. As the keynote put it, the argument about demand for tokenization is over.

Regulation is why the mood changed from last year. The GENIUS Act gave payment stablecoins legitimacy, and speakers repeatedly pointed to the CLARITY Act, still working through the Senate, as the bigger unlock. RedStone co-founder Marcin Kazmierczak framed it bluntly: CLARITY could be a 10x or even 100x moment relative to GENIUS, because it opens the door to the full range of asset classes.

Where’s the traction? Cash and collateral are the beachheads

Collateral is where tokenization earns its keep first. On the

repo panel

, Broadridge's Robert Krugman said his firm now moves around $370 billion of tokenized repo a day on the Canton network. That is a sliver of the $12 trillion US repo market, but a real one, and the programmability pitch is simple.

"If you want to borrow for five minutes, you pay for five minutes [instead of a full day]. It's a no-brainer," said Ami Ben-David, CEO at Ownera.

Asset managers echoed utility over novelty. A recurring principle was that if you tokenize a product, it has to be a net better product than the one it replaces. Apollo's Christine Moy said the firm's tokenized private credit fund has confirmed what she calls the "superpowers" of onchain assets: secondary liquidity for otherwise illiquid products, and the ability to post private credit as collateral in DeFi protocols like Aave and Morpho.

Treasury desks are coming around for similar reasons. On the

Onchain Treasury Management panel

, WisdomTree's Maredith Hannon described a small US construction company paying an Argentine vendor today, through a tokenized money market fund behind a familiar web interface. No second bank account, and the treasurer earns yield while the money moves. Citi's Ryan Rugg described the bank's tokenized deposits and its 24/7 dollar clearing, while stressing that clients "don't want just a Citi token." They want multi-bank rails.

The gap between minting and utility

What is still broken? Plenty, and panelists said so.

Distribution first. Moy's point was that the next wave of investors started with bitcoin and a cartoon monkey, not a blue-chip stock, and you meet them in their wallet. Maple has taken that literally, originating loans on-chain in stablecoins.

There’s also a challenge in compliance. Fidelity's Jasmine Jia described a manager thrown into a scramble when a client received a token as an airdrop, a trivial sum that still tripped internal alarms and put compliance modernization on the agenda. The earlier-mentioned survey backed her up, with 49% naming the integration of blockchain into traditional portfolio and risk frameworks as their biggest readiness gap.

Additional Results from the EY and Coinbase Institutional Survey

Finally, there’s fragmentation and lack of interoperability. On the

settlement panel

, Stellar’s Raja Chakravorti called interoperability the single greatest long-term unlock, since assets stuck on a single platform or blockchain cannot move freely. With hundreds of chains and competing notions of finality, liquidity spreads thinner and thinner. Ripple's Lauren Berta noted that finality varies across chains, and a trade counted as settled can still reverse, which does not scale. No one on stage claimed to have solved it yet.

The mood at the Glasshouse was not hype. It was an industry that knows what it has and knows what it’s missing. Next year tells us whether we built the boring parts. For additional recordings of the conference sessions, please visit the

Tokenize This YouTube channel

.

-

Jason Barraza, director of institutional strategy, RedStone

Ask an Expert

Q. Tokenized equity trading volumes hit a new all-time high in June. How significant is that number really?

June saw $3.86 billion in on-chain tokenized equity trading volumes, a 145% jump from May. The SpaceX IPO was the main catalyst, with tokenized SPCX generating $1.19 billion across platforms including Backpack and xStocks.

It’s important to note that most activity runs through synthetic wrappers rather than issuer-sponsored structures, and a large share is perpetual futures rather than spot. The on-chain market cap of tokenized equities is $1.53 billion, a fraction of the $1.5 trillion in combined trading volume year-to-date. The data shows strong demand for on-chain equity exposure. It does not yet show that demand being met through direct ownership.

Q. Not all tokenized equity products are the same. What is the most important distinction to understand?

The central question is what the token actually represents. In the strongest model, the token is the share itself, meaning ownership, voting rights and dividends travel with it. In a synthetic wrapper, the investor owns a contractual claim against another entity, not the underlying share, introducing counterparty risk, tracking risk and the possibility that corporate actions do not pass through correctly.

Two tokens with the same ticker can represent very different instruments. The SEC's January 2026 staff statement drew this distinction explicitly. For advisors evaluating these products, the structure is not a technical detail. It determines what rights the holder actually has.

Q. How developed is the regulatory framework at this point?

More developed than most people realize, but with gaps remaining. In the past eight months, the SEC issued a no-action letter for DTC tokenization services, published a staff statement establishing ownership taxonomy and approved Nasdaq's proposal to trade tokenized securities alongside conventional shares. DTCC completed its first live production transactions this month.

Despite the progress, uncertainty still exists. Tokenized equities remain largely restricted to non-U.S. or accredited investors, the CLARITY Act has not been enacted, and third-party synthetic models carry more legal uncertainty than issuer-sponsored structures. The framework is building in a clear direction, but there is still much to accomplish to drive confidence and adoption.

-

Joshua de Vos, head of research, CoinDesk

Keep Reading

Clarity Act update: A new version of the

Digital Asset Market Clarity Act

is circulating as the U.S. Senate sets up for what could be its last major push to get the crypto industry’s long-awaited market structure bill into law.

Russia's State Duma passes its

cryptocurrency regulation bill

, legalizing crypto for cross-border trade while keeping domestic payments banned, with the main provisions taking effect September 1 pending Putin's signature.

Japan reclassifies

crypto as a financial asset

, as lawmakers state crypto has outgrown its role as a payment method and requires rules designed for investment products.

Looking for more? Receive the latest crypto news from coindesk.com and market updates from coindesk.com/institutions.

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